Sentencing Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 134, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on his very passionate speech.

This issue has come up several times, but it does need more emphasis. It is incredibly important. Although I very much support the intentions of the Sentencing Bill, we cannot avoid at least acknowledging the strain already placed on the Probation Service. If we are going to put new demands on the service, we must first be confident that it can meet them. The latest report from the National Audit Office makes it painfully clear that the service is struggling with staff shortages, rising workloads and unsatisfactory outcomes. Only 79% of target staffing levels for qualified probation officers have been met, leaving around 1,500 vacancies across England and Wales. Of the 12 regions, 10 are operating beyond full capacity, and almost half of local delivery units are now rated red or amber for performance.

In that context, asking His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation to confirm adequate capacity before we put pressure on it is a necessary safeguard. If we want the measures in the Bill to succeed, our Probation Service must be set up to succeed. This proposed new clause would ensure that—I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his kind words about it; I am a complete passenger on this—and that is why I am pleased to second it.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 93E. In this case, the capacity is that of prison officers. The amendment calls for an annual report, but, as we discussed on the first day in Committee, the wording is really only a mechanism to introduce an issue. In this case, this is a probing amendment seeking assurances about activities and the need for prison officers to support those activities.

It is common sense that activities in prison are important. Nothing in what I say is intended to downplay the work of probation officers; this is just a different focus. Activities that are “purposeful”—a word that we used a lot on the previous day—including, in particular, educational and vocational activities, are too often either not available or not sufficiently available. They would not all be delivered by prison officers, but they need their buy-in and support. I have raised this because I have become aware, as others will have been for longer than I have, of the shortage of prison officers and the strain on them. To be attractive, the work needs to be more rewarding and to have its professional status recognised.

Purposeful activity—by which I mean meaningful and rehabilitative, not performative—should be central to time in prison to reduce reoffending and for transferable skills to be taught. But we know that activities start from a low base—they are inadequate in number and, I guess, in type—and are cancelled because of chronic staffing shortages. As a result, basic numeracy and literacy are not available.

As the Justice and Home Affairs Committee report said:

“The Ministry of Justice should prioritise purposeful activity as a core function of the prison regime, ensuring that work, education, and rehabilitative programmes are protected from disruptions caused by staffing shortages. This will require a strategic focus on maintaining consistent activity delivery, even in the face of staffing challenges”.


That was one of the recommendations accepted in full by the MoJ. This amendment therefore has two focuses: the activities themselves and the position of prison officers.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak first to my Amendment 93, which would remove the cap on sitting days in the Crown Court for sentencing hearings. This was an amendment moved by my honourable friend Monica Harding in the House of Commons. I will then move on more generally to sitting days and the other amendments in the group.

There has been a somewhat surreal argument in this House and elsewhere about the number of sitting days, given the appalling background of delays in Crown Court hearings, particularly with trials delayed sometimes, as we have heard, until 2029, which has amounted to a denial of justice as well as a delay in justice. Our wish is to see everything possible done to reduce court delays.

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For that reason, I hope the Minister will listen carefully to what has been said today. If the Government remain determined to legislate extensively in the realm of sentencing, they must also be prepared to legislate for the capacity required to make these sentences meaningful, safe and effective.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, before the Minister responds, perhaps I could ask the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, a question. I think that the amendment in his name and that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, refers back to their Amendment 76, headed “Electronic monitoring: practicability of enforcing restriction zone requirements”. That amendment itself acknowledges that there may be differences in the availability and accuracy of the technology in urban, rural and indoor environments. This is a straight question: I am not sure whether we are in the UK here, or just in England and Wales, but is the noble Lord suggesting that the restriction-zone condition should not be brought in until the whole country is covered by the technology?

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

We are saying that the relevant technology has to be available for this to work. It might be that it could be done on a regional basis, but the important thing is that it is not introduced somewhere where there is not the ability to make it work.

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am glad to see that we are picking up the pace slightly. The last group was a fairly brisk 13 or 14 minutes, so let us hope we can keep this up and get the Minister to bed at a half-decent hour. Of course, we are missing the joys of hearing about the somewhat shaking edition of the American constitution by being in the Chamber at the moment.

This amendment is linked to Amendment 34, which we discussed last week. Again, this is as a result of working in co-operation with an organisation I mentioned last week: the Marie Collins Foundation. I will start by referring to statements by various bodies that illustrate the nature of the problem this amendment seeks to flag up. The following quotation is from the 2023 report of the College of Policing and the NPCC on the national analysis of police-recorded child sexual abuse and exploitation:

“Within the online space, perpetrators of sexual grooming are most commonly adults aged 18 to 29 years. This highlights the risk posed to children in the online space by adults looking to abuse and exploit them. Abuse of children by adults is more likely to be hidden and requires a strong law enforcement response focusing on pursuing perpetrators, as well as a response focused on prevention”.


The next quotation is from the National Crime Agency this year, in the national strategic assessment of serious and organised crime:

“We estimated in the National Strategic Assessment 2024 that 710,000 to 840,000 adults in the UK pose varying degrees of sexual risks to children”,


a pretty horrifying total.

“However, police recorded crime does not effectively reflect the full scale of online offending, as one offence can relate to multiple instances of child sexual abuse material, and the most serious physical offence is recorded instead of any precursor online offences such as grooming”.

Lastly, hot off the press, as of yesterday, is part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry, which is pretty horrifying reading for those of your Lordships who have not read it. On page 173, under the heading, “The effect of pornography and social media”, Dame Angiolini says that

“there needs to be recognition of the link between perpetrators’ online behaviours and their behaviours in the physical world”.

They are directly linked.

The key issues in this area are, first of all, an overreliance on non-custodial sentences. In 2020, 80% of those sentenced for sexual communication with a child avoided prison. It is the magistrates’ courts rather than the criminal courts that dominate the outcomes. Online child safety risk is escalating rapidly. The Internet Watch Foundation reported an 830% rise in child sexual abuse material on the internet since 2014, making 2024 the worst year on record. The phenomenon of technology-assisted child sexual abuse—I think I introduced your Lordships to the acronym, TACSA, last week—lives in the shadow of child sexual abuse and is underrecognised.

We all acknowledge—it is the reason that we are talking about this Bill—that there is an issue with capacity in prison places. One factor in this area is that offenders can effectively strategise what the outcome of their offence might be. If it is a sufficiently heinous offence, with a lot of class A material, for example, on their computers, rather than going to the criminal court, where it is quite possible they might get a custodial sentence, what they can opt to do, and many of them do, is plead guilty, which automatically means the case goes to the magistrates’ court, in which case the sentencing powers are much more limited. This is a tactical way in which it is possible to get out of jail early by pleading guilty and opting to go to a magistrates’ court. That is causing a lot of concern, particularly, as you might imagine, to victims.

There is a coverage gap to do with the unduly lenient sentence scheme, because that reviews only Crown Court sentences. If a magistrates’ court with a particularly unpleasant case decides that a custodial sentence is the right way to go, there is no appeal mechanism under the unduly lenient sentence scheme to challenge that. Further, there is a misconception of harm. This type of online abuse is regarded as less serious than contact forms of child abuse. However, there is an increasing amount of research making the direct link that those who start off abusing children online are particularly statistically likely at some point to go on and actually do it physically.

I turn to what one would like to see happen. The first thing is improved parity and sentencing range for this particular type of egregious online abuse, so that the technological abuse of a child has parity with the physical abuse of a child—or they are brought more into balance, because at the moment, there is a clear imbalance between the two. Secondly, we should expand the unduly lenient sentence scheme to include all offences of this type, so they could be looked at if a magistrates’ court has given a rather lenient sentence. In an ideal world, one would like to prohibit the use of suspended sentences for these kinds of offences, many of which are deeply unpleasant. We should prohibit the use of what is called good-character mitigation in many of these cases. It is very hard to use good-character mitigation when an individual is found, as in some cases, to have more than 1,000 examples of class A child abuse material on their computer.

Last week, in response to discussion about Amendment 34, the Minister said on mitigation, or the ability to challenge the sentence, that it was possible for the offence to be challenged under the unduly lenient sentence scheme

“where the court is of the opinion that the offender is dangerous”.—[Official Report, 26/11/25; col. 1369.]

However, that does not cover the cases that I mentioned that go through the magistrates’ courts.

Finally, I shall give one or two examples of what happens when individuals go through the magistrates’ court. An 18 year-old from east London who had 183 category A images got a two-year community order. A 62 year-old from Cumbria had 503 category A images, and he got an eight-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, and 200 hours of unpaid work. A 26 year-old from Norfolk had 69 category A videos, and he was sentenced to six months in jail, suspended for 12 months. And the list goes on. One of our more energetic newspapers, the Sun, profiled a large number of these individuals under the usually slightly brash headline. Basically, it said that something is wrong with the system if this is what is happening.

I have explained the background to why I have brought this amendment forward. It would be really helpful for us to look at this in more detail. The Minister indicated last week that he would be interested to hear more about this particular foundation and what it does. If he is willing, I would very much like to follow up his invitation to talk about this in more detail and to lay out what is happening and the imbalance that there is currently in the system, which is allowing a lot of deeply unpleasant men to get away with virtually no sentence whatever. On that basis, I beg to move.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

The noble Lord reminds me of a comment that was made, I think, during the proceedings on this Bill, but which is certainly apt. The online world and what my generation would regard as a different, real world have actually come together, and it is one world now.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, to follow on from what my noble friend Lady Hamwee has said, we on these Benches support this amendment, for all the reasons given and explained at length by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool.

I will add one point. We heard yesterday in the discussion on restricting jury trials about defendants gaming the system, with which, in the context of jury trials, I do not entirely agree. It undoubtedly happens some of the time, but not all of the time, because it is not a reason generally for electing a jury trial. The noble Lord, Lord Russell, has illuminated the degree to which defendants who are guilty of particularly nasty offences can game the system by retaining their cases in the magistrates’ court and avoiding committal to the Crown Court for sentence or trial. I am bound to say that his amendment shows an ingenious solution to that, by seeking to extend the unduly lenient sentence scheme. We support it on that basis as well.

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[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise that I did not get to speak at Second Reading. I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for earned release, that in addition to compliance with rules to earn early release, there should be meaningful, purposeful activity. Irrespective of how we look on a prison sentence, whether as a punishment, a sanction or a deterrent, engaging in purposeful activity will certainly help prevent recall from early release or reoffending. For all kinds of reasons, it is very important to stop the revolving door of somebody being released from prison and coming back, for one reason or another including reoffending.

In support of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Bach, I will mention here some work we did at the think tank Politeia, where I am research director. We called it Jailbreak and looked at schemes for what should happen to prisoners once they are sentenced. Among the various proposals that worked was a one-to-one adviser from the moment the offender came in to the moment they were released, who saw they had an education—which has been mentioned before—and that they had engaged in meaningful activity.

Noble Lords might be interested to know about one firm in Sheffield which taught offenders how to make umbrellas and promised them a job on release. Another meaningful activity—if the Minister will forgive my mentioning it—was provided by Timpson, which trained offenders in the craft of shoemaking and repairs, and also offered them a flat when they left, so they could live in a new place to start a new life and cut themselves off from their previous life and contacts, often in a criminal world. These things depended on engaging in meaningful activity, but they certainly contributed to avoiding recall, whether on early release or as a result of reoffending.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 139C takes a rather different approach to the adjudication system. Not for the first time, “The Archers” has drawn to aficionados’ attention issues that we had not considered before, and the adjudication system is a current example. I cannot say that I listened to every episode—although I make quite an effort to do so—but, in that context, an offender who was coming to the end of his sentence had a weapon planted in his cell. He was very worried that he was going to be on the wrong end of an adjudication and that his sentence would continue.

I understand that the current system is handling much larger numbers than would have occurred to me. In a three-month period last year, there were almost 69,000 adjudication outcomes, punishments rose and additional days were imposed more than 1,500 times. I was interested in the consistency between prisons and different governors. The Minister has told us that he gets reports about education and activities. I do not know what comparative records are kept by the MoJ about adjudication outcomes—I am sure that records are kept—and I do not know whether the Minister can comment on that tonight.

I was interested for another reason. I read somewhere —although I could not track it down again—a concern about the quasi-judicial nature of these decisions, which are made without recourse to appeal and without any of the other protections that one might normally see. Again, I would be grateful if the Minister has any comments to share. He had no warning of my asking these questions, so it is probably not fair to expect anything tonight, but I would like to place my concerns on the record. Perhaps he can write later, if he or the MoJ have anything to say.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting group. When the concept of earned progression was originally floated and considered by the Government, considerable stress was laid both on the Texas model and on the concept that there should be an element earning release rather than simply being told that you would be released unless days were added. I agree with the proposition that the concept of earned progression should involve a combination of reward and deterrence. To put it informally, there should be carrot as well as stick.

I also agree—I am sure the Minister does too—that the Bill introduces a scheme of early release provided that no delay on release has been imposed for bad behaviour. Having thought about this, I accept that it is a difficult challenge to import into the Bill more opportunity to earn release by engaging with opportunities for rehabilitative activities in the widest sense. It is certainly difficult to do so without damaging the Government’s desire to ensure that the prison population is limited and reduced.

I was attracted by the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Carter, in particular by the way he introduced it and his reasoning. It would give a role to the Parole Board in recognising a prisoner’s earning release. While I found many of the arguments from the noble Lord, Lord Bach, persuasive—as I always do—I remain concerned by the element of compulsion in the amendment that would prevent some offenders earning release, through no fault of their own, if they were unable, for whatever reason, to participate in rehabilitative activity. I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response.

On these Benches, we would welcome proposals from the Government to introduce a measure of incentive to the earned progression model. As I understand it, currently when days are added, there is a quasi-judicial determination by a district judge. One would hope that such a district judge hearing an added-days case would always take into account a prisoner’s progress towards rehabilitation. However, that could be further developed to introduce some statutory element, whereby added-days hearings would always take into account any progress that the offender had made.